DR11 - Purple Cane Road

by James Lee Burke

  At sunset, when he headed for shore, the crushed ice in his cooler was layered with trout, his empty beer cans floated in the bilge, and the flying fish leaping out of the crests of waves and the raindrops that dented the swells were the perfect end to a fine day.

  He winched his boat onto his trailer and put on his tropical shirt, but his skin was stiff with sunburn and dried salt, and he was sure the only remedy for his discomfort was a foot-long chili dog and a six-pack of Dixie to go.

  The 911 Club was built out of cinder blocks and plywood on a sandy flat by the side of the road. It was owned by an ex-Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff who supposedly welcomed everyone at his bar, but most of his clientele, particularly on weekends, was made up of police officers, male and female, or those who wished to imitate them.

  A gathering of sports trappers was taking place at the bar and in the parking lot when Clete came down the road. The trappers wore olive-green T-shirts, dog tags, camouflage pants they tucked inside combat boots, goatees that bristled on the chin. They automatically crushed their aluminum cans in their hands after draining them, lit their cigarettes with Bic lighters, sucking in on the flame with the satisfaction of dragons breathing smoke, touching their genitalia when they laughed.

  But Clete didn't care about the trappers. He saw at least four men and two women, white and black, he knew from the Second and Third districts in New Orleans. They crossed the parking lot and went inside the double screen doors. They were carrying open cans of beer and laughing, the way people would at a private party.

  Just go on up the road, Clete thought.

  He did. For a hundred yards. But if he didn't buy beer and something to eat at the 911 Club, he would have to drive two miles farther up the road.

  There was a difference between caution and driving two extra miles because you were afraid of the people you used to work with.

  He made a U-turn and pulled his Cadillac and boat trailer onto the oyster shells of the 911 parking lot and went in the side door.

  Don Ritter was at the bar, peeling a hard-boiled egg while he told a story to the men around him.

  "The Kit Carsons were V.C. who'd gone over to our side," he said. "This one little sawed-off dude, we called him 'Bottles' because of his glasses, he kept saying, 'Boss, you leave me behind, VC. gonna make it real hard.'

  "So I told him, 'I'd like to help you, little buddy, but you haven't showed us a lot. Let's face it. Your ville's V.C. Those are your relatives, right? A lot of people might question your loyalties.'

  "He goes, 'Time running out, boss. Americans going home. Bottles gonna be in the shitter.' I go, 'Wish I could help. But you know how it is. You got to bring us something we can use.'"

  Both of Ritter's elbows were propped on the bar while he picked tiny pieces of eggshell off his egg, grinning at the backs of his fingers.

  "So what'd he bring you?" another man said.

  "Can you believe this? He and his brother-in-law stole a slick from the ARVN and loaded it with these fifty-gallon drums of gasoline. They taped frags to the tops of the drums and flew over their own ville and burned it to the ground. He comes to me and says, 'Ville gone, boss. That good enough?'"

  Ritter started laughing. He laughed so hard tears coursed down his cheeks and a violent cough hacked in his chest. He held a paper napkin to his mouth, then began laughing and coughing again.

  The cops and trappers standing around Ritter waited.

  "What happened to Bottles?" another man asked.

  "You got me. I was on the Freedom Bird the next week . . . Oh, he probably did all right," Ritter said, wiping his eyes, lifting his glass to his mouth.

  Clete ordered a chili dog and a draft and went to the men's room. Ritter's eyes followed him, then the eyes of the other men turned and followed him, too.

  When Clete came back out, the jukebox was playing and someone was racking pool balls. At first he wasn't sure about the references he was now hearing in the story Ritter was telling his friends.

  "His wife was a muff-diver. That's not exaggeration. My wife knew her. She dumped him for another dyke and went off to a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. Can you dig it? The guy comes home and thinks he's finally nailed her in the sack with the milkman and she's getting it on with another broad?" Ritter said.

  They're shitheads. Walk away from it, Clete thought.

  But the bartender had just set Clete's foot-long chili dog, smothered with melted cheese and chopped onions, in front of him and was now drawing a schooner of beer for him. So Clete hunched over his plate and ate with a spoon, his porkpie hat tilted over his forehead, and tried to ignore Ritter and his friends, whose conversation had already moved on to another subject.

  When he had finished eating and had drained the last of his beer, he started to get up from the stool and leave. But he paused, like a man who can't make up his mind to get on the bus, then sat back down, his skin crawling with dried salt under his shirt. What was it he had to set straight? The lie that still hung in the air about his ex-wife? That was part of it. But the real problem was that Ritter could ridicule and sneer with impunity because he knew Clete was chained by denial to his past and would always be an object of contempt in the eyes of other cops.

  "My ex left me because I was a drunk and I took juice and I popped a bucket of shit in Witness Protection," Clete said. "She wasn't a dyke, either. She just had the poor judgment to hang with your wife. The one who gave head to a couple of rookies at that party behind Mambo Joe's."

  They caught him in the parking lot, as he was opening his car door, Ritter and one of the trappers and an unshaved man who wore canvas pants and rubber boots and firehouse suspenders on his bare torso.

  The man in suspenders hit Clete in the back of the head with brass knuckles, then hooked him above the eye. As Clete bounced off the side of the Cadillac and crashed onto the shells, he saw the man in suspenders step away and Ritter take a long cylindrical object from him and pull a leather loop around his wrist.

  "You think you're still a cop because you throw pimps off a roof? In Camden guys who look like you drive Frito trucks. Here's payback for that crack about my wife. How you like it, skell?" Ritter said.

  16

  "HE USED A BATON on you?" I said.

  "Mostly on the shins," Clete said. He lay propped up in the hospital bed. There was a neat row of black stitches above his right eye and another one inside a shaved place in the back of his head.

  "How'd you get out of it?"

  "Some other cops stopped it." He took a sip from a glass of ice water. His green eyes roved around the room and avoided mine and showed no emotion. He pulled one knee up under the sheet and his face flinched.

  "This happened on Saturday. Where have you been since then?" I said.

  "Laid up. A lot of Valium, too much booze. I ran off the road tonight. The state trooper let me slide."

  "You weren't laid up. You were hunting those guys, weren't you?"

  "The one in canvas pants and suspenders, the dude who gave Ritter the baton? He was buds with that plainclothes, Burgoyne. I bet they were the two guys who beat the shit out of Cora Gable's chauffeur. By the way, I called the chauffeur and shared my thoughts."

  "Don't do this, Clete."

  "It's only rock 'n' roll."

  "They're going to put you in a box one day."

  "Ritter called me a skell."

  Tuesday morning the sheriff came into my office.

  "I need you to help me with some PR.," he said.

  "On what?"

  "It's a favor to the mayor. We can't have an ongoing war with the city of New Orleans. She and I are having lunch with some people to try and establish a little goodwill. You want to meet us at Lerosier?"

  "Bootsie's meeting me in the park."

  "Bring her along."

  "Who are these people we're having lunch with?"

  "P.R. types, who else? Come on, Dave, give me a hand here."

  Bootsie picked me UP at noon and we drove down East Main and parked up fr
om the Shadows and crossed the street and walked under the canopy of oaks toward the restaurant, which had been created out of a rambling nineteenth-century home with a wide gallery and ventilated green shutters.

  I saw the sheriff's cruiser parked in front of the restaurant, and, farther down, a white limousine with charcoal-tinted windows. I put my hand on Bootsie's arm.

  "That's Cora Gable's limo," I said.

  She slowed her walk for just a moment, glancing at the flowers in the beds along the edge of the cement.

  "I just wish I could get my hydrangeas to bloom like that," she said.

  We walked up the steps and into a foyer that served as a waiting area. I could see our newly elected woman mayor and the sheriff and three men in business suits and Cora Gable at a table in a banquet room. At the head of the table, his face obscured by the angle of the door, sat a man in a blue blazer, with French cuffs and a heavy gold watch on his wrist.

  "I have to go into the ladies' room a minute," Bootsie said.

  A moment later I looked through the glass in the front door and saw Micah, the chauffeur, come up the walk and sit in a wicker chair at the far end of the gallery and light a cigarette.

  I went back outside and stood by the arm of his chair. He smoked with his face averted and showed no recognition of my presence. Even though his forehead was freckled with perspiration, he did not remove his black coat or loosen his tie or unbutton his starched collar.

  "Miss Cora said you won't press charges against the two NOPD cops who worked you over," I said.

  "I'm not sure who they were. Waste of time, anyway," he replied, and tipped his ashes into his cupped palm.

  "Why?"

  He moved his neck slightly, so that the skin brushed like sandpaper against the stiff edges of his collar.

  "I got a sheet," he said.

  "People with records sue the system all the time. It's a way of life around here."

  "New Orleans cops have murdered their own snitches. They've committed robberies and murdered the witnesses to the robberies. Go work your joint somewhere else," he said, and leaned over the railing and raked the ashes off his palm.

  "You afraid of Gable?" I asked.

  He brushed at the ashes that had blown back on his black clothes. Sweat leaked out of his hair; the right side of his face glistened like a broken strawberry cake.

  I went back inside just as Bootsie was emerging from the ladies' room. We walked through the tables in the main dining area to the banquet room in back where Jim Gable stood at the head of the table, pouring white wine into his wife's glass.

  "Jim says y'all know each other," the sheriff said to me.

  "We sure do," I said.

  "Bootsie's an old acquaintance, too. From when she lived in New Orleans," Gable said, the corners of his eyes threading with lines.

  "You look overheated, Dave. Take off your coat. We're not formal here," the mayor said. She was an attractive and gentle and intelligent woman, and her manners were sincere and not political. But the way she smiled pleasantly at Jim Gable while he poured wine into her glass made me wonder in awe at the willingness of good people to suspend all their self-protective instincts and accept the worst members of the human race into their midst.

  There was something obscene about his manner that I couldn't translate into words. His mouth constricted to a slight pucker when he lifted the neck of the wine bottle from the mayor's glass. He removed a rose that was floating in a silver center bowl and shook the water from it and placed it by her plate, his feigned boyishness an insult to a mature woman's intelligence. During the luncheon conversation his tongue often lolled on his teeth, as though he were about to speak; then his eyes would smile with an unspoken, mischievous thought and he would remain silent while his listener tried to guess at what had been left unsaid.

  With regularity his eyes came back to Bootsie, examining her profile, her clothes, a morsel of food she was about to place on her lips.

  When he realized I was looking at him, his face became suffused with an avuncular warmth, like an old friend of the family sharing a mutual affection.

  "Y'all are fine people, Dave," he said.

  Just before coffee was served, he tinked his glass with a spoon.

  "Ms. Mayor and Sheriff, let me state the business side of our visit real quickly," he said. "Our people are looking into that mess on the Atchafalaya. Obviously some procedures weren't followed. That's our fault and not y'all's. We just want y'all to know we're doing everything possible to get to the bottom of what happened . . . Dave, you want to say something?"

  "No," I said.

  "Sure?" he said.

  "I don't have anything to say, Gable."

  "Friends don't call each other by their last names," he said.

  "I apologize," I said.

  He smiled and turned his attention away from the rest of the table. "You lift, don't you? I've always wanted to get into that," he said to me.

  "I haven't had much time. I'm still tied up with that Little Face Dautrieve investigation. Remember Little Face? A black hooker who worked for Zipper Clum?" I said.

  "No bells are going off," he said.

  "We hope to have all of you to a lawn party as soon as the weather cools," Cora Gable said. "It's been frightfully hot this summer, hasn't it?"

  But Gable wasn't listening to his wife. His arm rested on top of the tablecloth and his eyes were fixed indolently on mine. His nails were clipped and pink on his small fingers.

  "I understand Clete Purcel had trouble with some off-duty cops. Is that what's bothering you, Dave?" he said.

  I looked at my watch and didn't answer. Gable lit a thin black cigar with a gold lighter and put the lighter in his shirt pocket.

  "What a character," he said, without identifying his reference. "You and Purcel must have made quite a pair."

  "Please don't smoke at the table," Bootsie said.

  Gable looked straight ahead in the silence, a smile frozen on his mouth. He rotated the burning tip of his cigar in the ashtray until it was out, and picked up his wineglass and drank from it, his hand not quite hiding the flush of color in his neck.

  From behind the caked makeup on her face, Cora Gable watched her husband's discomfort the way a hawk on a telephone wire might watch a rabbit snared in a fence.

  After lunch, as our group moved through the dining room and out onto the gallery and front walk, the sheriff hung back and gripped my arm.

  "What the hell was going on in there?" he whispered.

  "I guess I never told you about my relationship with Jim Gable," I said.

  "You treated him like something cleaned out of a drainpipe," he said.

  "Go on?" I said.

  But Jim Gable was not the kind of man who simply went away after being publicly corrected and humiliated. While Micah was helping Cora Gable into the back of the limo, Gable stopped me and Bootsie as we were about to walk back to our car.

  "It was really good to see y'all," he said.

  "You'll see more of me, Jim. I guarantee it," I said, and once again started toward our car.

  "You look wonderful, Boots," he said, and took her hand in his. When he released it, he let his fingers touch her wrist and trail like water down the inside of her palm. To make sure there was no mistaking the insult, he rubbed his thumb across her knuckles.

  Suddenly I was standing inches from his face. The sheriff was out in the street and had just opened the driver's door of his cruiser and was now staring across the roof at us.

  "Is there something wrong, Dave?" Gable asked.

  "Would you like to have a chat over in the alley?" I said.

  "You're a lot of fun," he said, and touched my arm good-naturedly. "Twenty-five years on the job and you spend your time chasing down pimps and whores and talking about it in front of your new mayor." He shook the humor out of his face and lit another cigar and clicked his lighter shut. "It's all right to smoke out here, isn't it?"

  I went BACK to the office and spent most of the afternoon
doing paperwork. But I kept thinking about Jim Gable. In A.A. we talk about putting principles before personalities. I kept repeating the admonition over and over to myself. Each time I did I saw Gable's fingers sliding across my wife's palm.

  When the phone rang I hoped it was he.

  "I thought I'd check in," the voice of Johnny Remeta said.

  "You have a thinking disorder. You don't check in with me. You have no connection with my life."

  "You know a New Orleans cop named Axel?"